Frequently asked questions

@@PROLOGUE Frequently asked questions

This is a set of questions and answers to common problems and issues.

As we receive more emails about the software, we will add new questions to this page.

The developers can be reached via the chrony-dev mailing list. See question 1.4. for details.

@@ENDPROLOGUE S: Administrative issues Q: Where can I get chrony source code? Tarballs are available via the Download link on the Chrony Web site. For the current development from the developers' version control system see the Git link on the Web site. Q: Are there any packaged versions of chrony? We are aware of packages for Debian, Fedora, Gentoo, Mandriva, Slackware, and Ubuntu. We are not involved with how these are built or distributed. Q: Where is the home page? It is currently at http://chrony.tuxfamily.org/. Q: Is there a mailing list? Yes, it's currently at chrony-users@chrony.tuxfamily.org. There is a low-volume list called chrony-announce which is just for announcements of new releases or similar matters of high importance. You can join the lists by sending a message with the subject subscribe to chrony-users-request@chrony.tuxfamily.org or chrony-announce-request@chrony.tuxfamily.org respectively. For those who want to contribute to the development of chrony, there is a developers' mailing list. You can subscribe by sending mail with the subject subscribe to chrony-dev-request@chrony.tuxfamily.org. Q: What licence is applied to chrony? Starting from version 1.15, chrony is licensed under the GNU General Public License, Version 2. Versions prior to 1.15 were licensed under a custom BSD-like license. S: Chrony compared to other programs Q: How does chrony compare to xntpd? If your computer is permenently connected, or connected for long periods (that is, for the several hours it takes xntpd to settle down), or you need to support hardware reference clocks to your computer, then xntpd will work fine. Apart from not supporting hardware clocks, chrony will work fine too. If your computer connects to the 'net for 5 minutes once a day (or something like that), or you turn your (Linux v2.0) computer off when you're not using it, or you want to use NTP on an isolated network with no hardware clocks in sight, chrony will work much better for you. The reason I wrote chrony was that I could not get xntpd to do anything sensible on my PC at home, which is connected to the 'net for about 5 minutes once or twice a day, mainly to upload/download email and news. Nowadays it is also turned off for 22-23 hours a day, when not in use. I wanted a program which would : - slew the time to correct it when I go online and NTP servers become visible - determine the rate at which the computer gains or loses time and use this information to keep it reasonably correct between connects to the 'net. This has to be done using a method that does not care about the intermittent availability of the references or the fact the computer is turned off between groups of measurements.. - maintain the time across reboots, by working out the error and drift rate of the computer's real-time clock and using this information to set the system clock correctly at boot up. (In the last few months, it became impossible for me to leave my computer powered permanently.) Also, when working with isolated networks with no true time references at all, I found xntpd gave me no help with managing the local clock's gain/loss rate on the NTP master node (which I set from my watch). I added some automated support in chrony to deal with this. S: Compilation issues Q:How do I apply source patches? Sometimes we release source patches rather than a full version when we need to provide a fix for small problems. Supposing you have chrony-1.X.tar.gz and a source patch chrony-1.X-1.X.1.gz. The steps required are: tar xzvf ../chrony-1.X.tar.gz cd chrony-1.X gunzip < ../../chrony-1.X-1.X.1.gz | patch -p1 ./configure make make install Q:Can I compile chrony with an ANSI-C compiler that is not GCC v2.x? I have had reports that chrony can be compiled with GCC v1.42, by using the following trick when running make make CC='gcc -D__FUNCTION__=\"function_not_available\"' (this gets around the lack of a __FUNCTION__ macro in GCC v1.) The same trick may be enough to allow other compilers to be used. Q: I get errors like 'client.c:44: readline/readline.h: file not found' Read the section about 'readline' in the INSTALL file or in chrony.txt. You may need to disable readline support (e.g. if you haven't got readline installed at all, or just don't want it), or specify the location of the readline files (e.g. if you've installed them in a non-standard place). Q: I have RedHat 7.3 and can't compile rtc_linux.c (error in spinlock.h) The following solution has been found for this. Enter the following 3 commands (as root): cd /usr/include/ mv linux linux.rh ln -s /usr/src/linux/include/linux ./linux The problem seems to be that RedHat provide their own kernel header files in /usr/include/linux. Besides differing from those used by your current kernel, if you compiled it yourself, they also seem to have been changed in a way that causes a problem compiling chrony. Chrony compiles fine with standard kernel header files. There have also been reports that just replacing the file /usr/src/linux/spinlock.h by the equivalent file from a vanilla kernel source tree is sufficient to fix the problem. Note : from version 1.21 onwards, this problem no longer exists. The kernel header files are no longer included. S: Selection of NTP servers Q: I have several computers on a LAN. Should I make one the master, or make them all clients of an external server? I think the best configuration is to make one computer the master, with the others as clients of it. Add a 'local' directive to the master's chrony.conf file. This configuration will be better because * the load on the external connection is less * the load on the external NTP server(s) is less * if your external connection goes down, the computers on the LAN will maintain a common time with each other. S: Addressing issues Q: I get the following error message : "Could not get IP adress for localhost" Add a line like the following to your /etc/hosts file 127.0.0.1 localhost Q: I have problems if I put the names of my NTP servers in the chrony.conf file. If you have no connection to the Internet at boot time, chrony won't be able to turn the names into IP addresses when it starts. There seem to be 2 solutions: 1. Put the numeric IP addresses in the chrony.conf file or 2. Put the server->IP address mappings in your /etc/hosts file and ensure that /etc/host.conf reads 'order hosts,bind'. The problem is that chronyd (currently) isn't designed in a way that allows hostname->IP address lookups during normal operation. I hope to work on this problem very soon. S: My computer is not synchronising. This is the most common problem. There are a number of reasons, see the following questions. Q: Behind a firewall? If there is a firewall between you and the NTP server you're trying to use, the packets may be blocked. Try using a tool like etherfind or tcpdump to see if you're getting responses from the server. If you have an external modem, see if the receive light blinks straight after the transmit light (when the link is quiet apart from the NTP traffic.) Try adding 'log measurements' to the chrony.conf file and look in the measurements.log file after chrony has been running for a short period. See if any measurements appear. Most people run chronyd on the firewall itself, to avoid all issues of UDP packet forwarding and/or masquerading. Q: Do you have a non-permanant (i.e. intermittent) Internet connection? Check that you're using chronyc's 'online' and 'offline' commands appropriately. Again, check in measurements.log to see if you're getting any data back from the server. Q: In measurements.log, do the '7' and '8' flag columns always show zero? Do you have a 'local stratum X' directive in the chrony.conf file? If X is lower than the stratum of the server you're trying to use, this situation will arise. You should always make X quite high (e.g. 10) in this directive. S: Issues with chronyd Q: chronyd crashes after a syslog message "adjtimex failed for set frequency" The usual cause is that the kernel is running with a different value of 'HZ' (the timer interrupt rate) than the value that was found in the kernel header files when chrony was compiled. The chrony.conf file can include options to modify the HZ value (see the discussion of linux_hz and linux_freq_scale in the documentation), however the problem is to find the value of HZ being used. S: Issues with chronyc Q: I keep getting the error '510 No command access from this host --- Reply not authenticated'. Make sure that the chrony.conf file (on the computer where chronyd is running) has a 'cmdallow' entry for the computer you are running chronyc on. This shouldn't be necessary for localhost, but some people still seem to need an entry like 'cmdallow 127.0.0.1'. (It would be good to understand why problem only affects some people). Q: I cannot log in from chronyc to carry out privileged tasks. This is the second most common problem. Perhaps your /etc/chrony.keys file is badly formatted. Make sure that the final line has a line feed at the end, otherwise the key on that line will work as though the last character is missing. (Note, this bug was fixed in version 1.16.) Q: When I enter a command and hit <Return>, chronyc hangs This probably means that chronyc cannot communicate with chronyd. Perhaps chronyd is not running. Try using the ps command (e.g. on Linux, 'ps -auxw') to see if it's running. Or try 'netstat -a' and see if the ports 123/udp and 323/udp are listening. If chronyd is not running, you may have a problem with the way you are trying to start it (e.g. at boot time). Perhaps you have a firewall set up in a way that blocks packets on port 323/udp. You need to amend the firewall configuration in this case. Q: Is the chronyc<->chronyd protocol documented anywhere? Only by the source code :-) See cmdmon.c (chronyd side) and client.c (chronyc side). S: Real-time clock issues. Q: What is the real-time clock (RTC)? This is the clock which keeps the time even when your computer is turned off. It works with 1 second resolution. chronyd can monitor the rate at which the real-time clock gains or loses time, and compensate for it when you set the system time from it at the next reboot. See the documentation for details. Q: I want to use chronyd's real-time clock support. Must I disable hwclock? The hwclock program is often set-up by default in the boot and shutdown scripts with many Linux installations. If you want to use chronyd's real-time clock support, the important thing is to disable hwclock in the shutdown procedure. If you don't, it will over-write the RTC with a new value, unknown to chronyd. At the next reboot, chronyd will compensate this (wrong) time with its estimate of how far the RTC has drifted whilst the power was off, giving a meaningless initial system time. There is no need to remove hwclock from the boot process, as long as chronyd is started after it has run. Q: I just keep getting the '513 RTC driver not running' message For the real time clock support to work, you need the following three things: * a kernel that is supported (e.g. 2.2 onwards) * enhanced RTC support compiled into the kernel * an 'rtcfile' directive in your chrony.conf file. S: Problems with isolated networks. Q: When I use the 'settime' command, chronyd crashes. If you enter times that are too far away from the real time, chronyd will think the system clock runs fast or slow by an excessive amount. The required compensation factor will be outside the bounds for the adjtimex() system call. chronyd will crash when it tries to apply such an excessive adjustment. S: Microsoft Windows Q: Does chrony support Windows? No. The chronyc program (the command-line client used for configuring chronyd while it is running) has been successfully built and run under Cygwin in the past. chronyd is not portable, because part of it is very system-dependent. It needs adapting to work with Windows' equivalent of the adjtimex() call, and it needs to be made to work as an NT service. Q: Are there any plans to support Windows? We have no plans to do this. Anyone is welcome to pick this work up and contribute it back to the project. Q: What alternative NTP clients are there for Windows? Some of the names we've seen mentioned are - Automachron - NetTime (nettime.sourceforge.net) S: NTP-specific issues Q: Can chrony be driven from broadcast NTP servers? No. I remember looking at how they worked when I was first writing chrony. Since the 'target market' then was dial-up systems, broadcast packets were not relevant so I didn't bother working out how to deal with the complexities of doing the delay estimation. I no longer have root access to a LAN environment to develop and test broadcast server support. Neither have I the time to work on this. I would be very happy to accept a patch from anyone who can develop, test and debug the necessary changes! Q: Can chronyd transmit broadcast NTP packets (e.g. to synchronise other computers on a private LAN)? Yes. Starting from version 1.17, chrony has this capability. Q: Can chrony keep the system clock a fixed offset away from real time? I have not experimented much, but I don't believe this would be possible as the program currently stands. Q: What happens if the network connection is dropped without using chronyc's 'offline' command first? In this case chronyd will keep trying to access the server(s) that it thinks are online. Eventually it will decide that they are unreachable and no longer consider itself synchronised to them. If you have other computers on your LAN accessing the computer that is affected this way, they too will become 'unsynchronised', unless you have the 'local' directive set up on the master computer. The 'auto_offline' option to the 'server' entry in the chrony.conf file may be useful to avoid this situation. S: Development Q: Can I get the source via git from anywhere? Yes. See the Git link at http://chrony.tuxfamily.org for information. S: Linux-specific issues Q: Why does the source code include kernel header files? The program needs to see the definitions of structures used to interact with the real time clock (via /dev/rtc) and with the adjtimex() system call. Sadly this has led to a number of compilation problems with newer kernels which have been increasingly hard to fix in a way that makes the code compilable on all Linux kernel versions (from 2.0 up anyway, I doubt 1.x still works.) Hopefully the situation will not deteriorate further with future kernel versions. Q: I get "Could not open /dev/rtc, Device or resource busy" in my syslog file. Check that you haven't accidentally got two copies of chronyd running (perhaps defined in different start-up scripts.) S: Solaris-specific issues Q: On Solaris 2.8, I get an error message about not being able to open kvm to change dosynctodr. (The dosynctodr variable controls whether Solaris couples the equivalent of its BIOS clock into its system clock at regular intervals). The Solaris port of chrony was developed in the Solaris 2.5 era. Some aspect of the Solaris kernel has changed which prevents the same technique working. I no longer have root access to any Solaris machines to work on this, and am reliant on somebody developing the patch and testing it. A good starting point would be to see if xntpd has been modified to work for Solaris 2.8. @@EPILOGUE

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